Open Source Facebook Alternative Raises More Than $115,000

May 14, 2010

By Developer.com Staff

There's been a lot of moaning in social media circles about Facebook's aggressive efforts to redefine what privacy means on the Internet. In response, a group of New York University students have tapped into that angst by launching the open sourceDiaspora project, and they've raised more than $115,000 in 19 days.

With another 19 days to go in their Kickstarter.com funding efforts, Wired magazine's Ryan Singel reported that the $115,000 of crowdsourced funding already represents a "significant angel round of founding in the Internet startup world."

At the time of this story, Diaspora has now raised $134,448. The NYU students were only hoping for $10,000.

"It's also impressive for a project proposal from four students who say they aren't going to start coding until they graduate from college this summer," Singel said. "And a testament to how strongly that a growing number of people want an alternative to a centralized and dominant social networking site."

But Diaspora isn't the only effort to unseat Facebook from it's throne at the top of the social networking kingdom.

There's also a distributed social networking service called OneSocialWeb that's being developed by four Vodafone employees.

"It's got working code and currently lets users share messages and make connections. The basic protocol is open, using the instant messaging protocol XMPP  the same as Google's innovative but lightly used Wave collaboration and messaging system," Singel reported.